Strawberry Cream Cheese Buns

If I lost all my recipe books in a natural disaster, as long as I could access the Internet, I could probably find all my staple baking recipes. And part of the reason is that I get most of my "to try" recipe material from following my favorite baking blogs, such as Bake or Break (see "My favorite blogs" for the link), the inspiration to today's recipe.

Jennifer (author of Bake or Break) says of this recipe from Buttercup Bake Shop in NYC, "If you never believe another one of my recipe endorsements, believe this one. These little treats are so, so good."

It's hard to resist such a statement, especially when it's accompanied by mouth-watering, gastric juice inducing photographs of aforementioned treats...

So this recipe made the shortlist.

This week was positively awful in the amount of non-research related work I had to take care of. Part of it was all those student committee things I do for my program, added to homework made for a hectic week. But I've finished the newsletter, got my homework in, turned in end of year reports to the student executive council for the medschool specialty interest group I'm still on exec board for, have made significant headway in getting things set up for the retreat this summer, and will have my hands clean of this PR photo-op for my program's promotional brochure in another week and a half. Too bad summer classes are starting up these next couple of weeks too.

I needed some baking therapy this weekend.

So these cream cheese buns (recipe here) were made with raspberry jam swirled in by Bake or Break, but as I didn't have any, I used strawberry jam.

You start out by beating the softened butter, 8 oz of cream cheese, and sugar together. Then add eggs and vanilla as common in muffin recipes. Then you alternatively mix in the dry ingredients and a bit of milk to complete the batter.

I didn't read the recipe closely enough before baking, though, and so I didn't notice that you have to split the flour (1 cup and 3/4 cup), and mix the 1 cup in first with the leaveners and milk, and then later mix in the 3/4 cup separately...I'm not entirely sure what the difference is that I mixed all the flour together... but certainly it did not make the end product any less delicious.

I spooned out the batter into 18 normal muffin cups, and tasked Michael with spooning a dollop of jam on each mound. I took a chopstick and swirled in the jam best I could, with the following result:


19 minutes at 350 degrees later, the wooden skewer came out clean, and these beauties came out of the oven. Michael had complained that the buns featured on Bake or Break were in the "delicious but not pretty" category. However, he crooned over these ones. I'm confused by his standards, because I certainly don't think our version looks better than the raspberry version...


And now the moment of truth: the first bite. Still a little warm, they were the most delicate yet light yet well-structured muffin-like things I've ever eaten. I might have to eat a few more to figure out this texture ;) Jennifer writes that they are very moist and creamy...which mine did not turn out to be, possibly because of the omitted flour separation mentioned above. Nevertheless, they are decidedly not muffin-like. Amazingly the cream cheese is not a prominent flavor presence--it's probably there to contribute to the "creaminess" profile of the bun.


If you've ever made muffins, these are just a couple of extra steps more and well worth the effort, and yes, I'll agree with Jennifer that they are so, so good.